Sunday

Aug 31, 2014 at 12:01 AM

Playwright George Brant had been curious about drones for a while. What was our government up to in the name of its citizens, he wondered? Then three years ago, after looking into the facts surrounding...

Playwright George Brant had been curious about drones for a while. What was our government up to in the name of its citizens, he wondered?

Then three years ago, after looking into the facts surrounding unmanned aircraft, he sat down to put his thoughts on paper and came up with “Grounded,” a one-woman play about a fighter pilot assigned to operate drones in the Nevada desert.

“Grounded,” which is a little over an hour in length but feels, said Brant, like a “full trip,” debuted last summer at Edinburgh’s famed Fringe Festival, before transferring to the Gate Theatre in London, where it got a “really, really lovely reception.”

The raves drew the attention of Tony Estrella, the artistic head of Pawtucket’s Gamm Theatre. He asked Brant to send him the script, and decided to kick off the theater’s 30th season Thursday with the play.

The 44-year-old Brant, who spent about eight years in Providence with his director wife, Laura Kepley, said he at first was interested in drones in general, in the secrecy surrounding them and who was on the “kill” list. But once he began to learn about the pilots, the story came together.

He assumed the pilots flew their drones from the countries they were patrolling, but later learned that drones flying over Afghanistan are often operated in the desert outside Las Vegas, where in just over a second they can obliterate a target 8,000 miles away.

“Unlike other wars,” he said, “the pilots go home at night, and I found that intriguing, how they spend their days killing people and go home to chores and taking the kids to soccer.”

And at that point, he decided the focus of his story should be a woman to give the portrait of a war a fresh face.

“We’ve seen the male story for thousands of years and I think we’re inured to it,” said Brant, who now lives in Clevelend, where Kepley, a former Trinity Rep director, is in her first season as head of the Cleveland Playhouse. “This is fairly new territory.”

He said using just one actor allowed him to get inside her head, to know her private thoughts, to cover three years in a sentence and conjure up a place with a word.

The play’s heroine was an ace fighter pilot who unexpectedly got pregnant, and when she returned to work found she had been reassigned to a windowless trailer in the Nevada desert, where she operated a drone over Afghanistan for 12 hours a day.

Setting it near Vegas, with its fake pyramids and gaudy strip, added an air of the surreal to the script and “threw off a lot of story sparks,” he said.

Even though there is a sense of distance and detachment from the enemy by using drones, the cameras on the aircraft allow the pilots to see the gruesome carnage they have wrought in great detail, he said.

“It intrigued me that what was supposed to make killing easier becomes strangely closer,” said Brant, who is writing a couple of screenplays, along with a play, about 1930s and 1940s gospel great Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

The pilot in his play is, of course, not happy about her transfer. After a prestigious career, she “went from the top of the top to being looked down upon,” he said.

“It’s a story of trying to survive a series of adjustments,” said Brant. “She has a tough row to hoe.”